For all the bad press given to national stereotypes, there are some that are more or less true, quite flattering – and good for business to boot.

The Spanish, for example, really do tend to be chatty and gregarious; and being known as the life and soul of the party is pretty handy if one of your key economic sectors is attracting tourists. By the same token, German manufacturers and engineering bureaus trade on their country’s worldwide reputation for precision and exactitude – a reputation well earned.

You can see exaggerated German precision in various spheres of everyday life. This is a country where new-build properties feature electronic showers which regulate water temperature to within a quarter of a degree Celsius; where the national rail website measures nominal walking distances between bus stands and train platforms to within a minute; and where housewives drive miles out of their way to get milk from Lidl because it is two cents cheaper than at Aldi on Tuesdays.

Auch Kleinvieh macht Mist is the motto, which translates more or less literally as “even little varmint adds to the dungheap” – or as one British supermarket more poetically puts it: “every little helps”. That must have been what the Hamburg transport authority was thinking with its incentive to move people onto smart ticketing this year: I now get a whacking three per cent off the travel price by buying on my phone, turning a €1.90 ticket into a more manageable €1.84 (they generously round up the €0.057 saving to a full six cents!).

Indeed, especially with money, German precision is wont to get out of hand. In restaurants, for example, the general practice is for each individual at a table to pay for exactly what she or he has eaten and drunk – not a cent more, not a cent less. For want of a better way of saying it: Germans never go Dutch. Even friends who have known each other for several years would hardly ever dream of just splitting a bill 50-50, regardless of how unnecessarily complex this can make things.

Let’s take a classic situation: four couples at dinner, all of whom order a starter, a main course, and a drink. Some of the starters are €6.50, some are €7; a couple of the mains are around the €13 mark, the others just shy of €15.00; since there tends to be no difference between the prices of alcoholic and soft drinks, it’s immaterial who had the coke and who had the beer. Yet rather than, in view of this, just saying: “Well, that sounds like about €25 per person with a tip”, nine times out of 10, the couples will pay for exactly what they had.

The waiter comes over with a bill for the table and asks “where shall I start?” The first couple then says which of the dishes they had and what they drank; the waiter scribbles the prices down on a notepad and does a quick tally up: “That’ll be €49.70, please.” The wife says “this one’s on me” and hands the waiter three 20 euro notes and tells him to take €54 from that to include his tip, returning €6 to her. The next couple decide to pay separately, so each of them puts the waiter through his mental arithmetic paces before handing over €22.50 and €23.40 respectively. Tipping should be easier here, since you can just hand over €25 and call it 10 per cent, but a stingier customer might well say “take €24.50 from that” and hold out their hand for that crucial 50 cent piece…

And so it goes on, with each person at the table paying essentially the same amount and tipping more or less the same amount, until lots of notepaper has been scribbled on, the chief barmaid asked to check the tally, and many a question posed along the lines of: “Jürgen, can you remember which starter I had? Was it the sauerkraut soup or the sausage salad?” or “Gudrun, are you sure you didn’t actually drink two cokes? Only the waiter says there’s one left over on the bill…”

The larger the group and the longer the evening, the more complicated the payment process becomes. And woe betide those who are last at the table on a rather hazy, beery evening, when people are liable to respond to the waiter’s question of “how many beers did you have” with a peculiar kind of fantasy underestimation – and then scarper before he gets back to the table with that dreaded Ich habe hier noch was ausstehen (I've a few things left on the bill).

As famous funny-man Loriot is said to have put it: German precision is never more hilarious than when it is falling down around everyone’s ears.

Of course, when it works, the German personalised billing etiquette has its strengths: if some people at the table come later than others and skip a course, for example, or if two people at the table eat filet steak and drink a bottle of expensive Bordeaux while the other six stick to pasta and Pinot Grigio, it’s a very fair way to settle things. It minimises bad blood, too, because no one can be accused of scrounging or round-dodging, behaviour that the British honours system does little to curb.

It also has a wider dimension. Germans expect that everyone should be scrupulously punctilious about paying their way – in both private and public life – to avoid owing anyone any favours. In a case that has baffled many outsiders, President Christian Wulff was forced to resign last year over allegations of corruption: state prosecutors are taking him to court over the remainders of two hotel bills picked up for him by his film-financier friend David Groenewold (€400 and €370 respectively).

To some, it seems like a trifling sum, but the fact that Wulff, in his previous office as regional president of Lower Saxony, granted Groenewold state guarantees for his film production company means that, as far as Germans are concerned, this is a cast iron case for a corruption inquiry.

Investigations into Wulff suggest a man who rarely ever opened his own wallet when someone else’s was close to hand and who, as such, no longer seemed a credible, impartial moral authority of the kind Germans understandably want as their head of state. German pecuniary precision – as exasperating as I sometimes find it – can be preferable to other alternatives. If only they could just live up to their reputation for precision engineering, then they might get their airports, stations, and cultural institutions built on budget too.